Population: 485

1

JABOWSKI’S CORNER

We are in trouble down here. There is blood in the dirt. We have made our call for help. Now we look to the sky.

SUMMER HERE COMES ON like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun. The swamps grow spongy and pungent. Standing water goes warm and soupy, clotted with frog eggs and twitching with larvae. Along the ditches, heron-legged stalks of canary grass shoot six feet high and unfurl seed plumes. In the fields, the clover pops its blooms and corn trembles for the sky.

If you were approaching from the sky, you would see farmland neatly delineated by tilled squares and irrigated circles. The forests, mostly hardwoods and new-growth pine, butt up against fields, terminating abruptly, squared off at fence lines. The swamps and wetlands, on the other hand, respect no such boundaries, and simply meander the lay of the land, spreading organically in fecund hundred-acre stains. The whole works is done up in an infinite palette of greens.

There is a road below, a slim strip of county two-lane, where the faded blacktop runs east-west, then bends—at Jabowski’s Corner—like an elbow. In the crook of the elbow, right in the space where you would cradle a baby, is a clot of people. My mother is there, and my sister, and several volunteer firefighters, and I have just joined them, and we are all on our knees, kneeling in a ring around a young girl who has been horribly injured in a car wreck. She is crying out, and we are doing what we can, but she feels death pressing at her chest. She tells us this, and we deny it, tell her no, no, help is on the way.

I do my writing in a tiny bedroom overlooking Main Street in the village of New Auburn, Wisconsin. Population: 485. Eleven streets. One four-legged silver water tower. Seasons here are extreme. We complain about the heat and brag about the cold. Summer is for stock cars and softball. Winter is for Friday-night fish fries. And snowmobiles. After a good blizzard, you’ll hear their Doppler snarl all through the dark, and down at the bar, sleds will outnumber cars. In the surrounding countryside, farmsteads with little red barns have been pretty much kicked in the head, replaced with monster dairies, turkey sheds, and vinyl-sided prefabs. The farmers who came to town to grind feed and grumble in the café have faded away. The grand old buildings are gone. There is a sense of decline. Or worse, of dormancy in the wake of decline. But we are not dead here. We still have our Friday-night football games. Polka dances. Bowling. If you know who to ask, you can still get yourself some moonshine, although methamphetamine has become the favored homebrew. Every day, the village dogs howl at the train that rumbles through town, and I like to think they are echoing their ancestors, howling at that first train when it stopped here in 1883. Maybe that’s all you need to know about this town—the train doesn’t stop here anymore.

Mostly I write at night, when most of this wee town—except for the one-man night shift at the plastics factory, and the most dedicated drinkers, and the mothers with colicky babies, and the odd insomniac widower, and the young couples tossing and turning over charge card balances and home pregnancy tests—is asleep. This is my hometown, and in these early hours, when time is gathering itself, I can kill the lights, crack the blinds, and, looking down on Main Street, see the ghost of my teenage self, snake-dancing beneath the streetlight, celebrating some football game twenty years gone. I was a farm boy then, rarely in town for anything other than school activities. I didn’t see Main Street unless I was in a parade or on a school bus.

But now Main Street is in my front yard. On a May evening nineteen years ago I walked out of the school gym in a blue gown and left this place. Now I have returned, to a house I remember only from the perspective of a school bus seat. In a place from the past, I am looking for a place in the present. This, as they say, is where my roots are. The trick is in reattaching. About a month after I moved back, I dropped by the monthly meeting of the volunteer fire department.

The New Auburn fire department was formed in 1905. The little village was just thirty years old, but it had already seen its share of change. The sawmill that spawned the settlement ran out of pine trees and shut down before the turn of the century. Forests gave way to farmland and New Auburn became a potato shipping center. Large, hutlike charcoal kilns sprang up beside the rail depot. In time, the village has been home to a wagon wheel factory, a brick factory, and a pickle factory. There was always something coming and going. But then, in 1974, the state converted the two lanes of Highway 53 to four lanes and routed them west of town, and the coming and going pretty much went. We have a gas station, two cafés, a couple of bars, and a handful of small businesses, but the closest thing to industry is the plastics factory, which employs two men per shift, rolling plastic pellets into plastic picnic table covers. Most of the steady work, the good-paying stuff, is thirty or forty miles away. During the day, the streets are still. It is from this shallow pool that the community must skim its firefighters. If we get a fire call during a weekday, we are likely to have more fire trucks than volunteer firefighters to drive them.

During that first meeting, a motion was made and seconded to consider my application as a member. The motion carried on a voice vote, and I was admitted on probationary status. After the meeting concluded, the chief led me to the truck bay. He is a stout man, burly but friendly. By day he dispatches freight trucks. Try on these boots, he said. We’ve got a helmet around here somewhere. Someone handed me a stiff pair of old fire pants—bunkers, they’re called. A farmer in a bar jacket showed me how to shift the pumper, his cigarette a sing-along dot dancing from word to word. That was it. I was now a member of the NAAFD—the New Auburn Area Fire Department.

Among my fellow volunteers are a pair of butchers, two truckers, a farmer, a carpenter, a mailman, and a mother of four. A guy like me ends up on the fire department for two reasons: (a) I have a pulse, and (b) I am frequently home during the day. I’ve put in seven years now, and am no longer on probation. I’ve been to house fires, barn fires, brush fires, and car fires, and I’ve had enough training to tell a halligan from a hydrant wrench. When one of the old-timers sends me after a water hammer, I don’t take the bait. I have attended firefighting classes at the tech school, where I learned that water hammer is a situation, not a tool. Still, my primary qualifications remain availability and a valid driver’s license.

Seven years since the accident, and this is what freezes me, late at night: There was a moment—a still, horrible moment—when the car came squalling to a halt, the violent kinetics spent, and the girl was pinned in silence. One moment gravel is in the air like shrapnel, steel is tumbling, rubber tearing, glass imploding, and then…utter stillness. As if peace is the only answer to destruction. The meadowlark sings, the land drops away south to the hazy tamarack bowl of the Big Swamp…all around the land is rank with life. The girl is terribly, terribly alone in a beautiful, beautiful world.

As long as I can remember, Stanislaw Jabowski was all stove up. Foggy autumn mornings, the school bus would stop where the county road cut between his house and barn, and we’d see him stumping along the path, pails in hand, shoulders rocking side to side with his hitch-along gait. Spare, he was. Short, and lean as a tendon. A walking Joshua tree, with a posture less tribute to adversity overcome than adversity withstood.

The farm was a rock patch. And where the rocks stopped, the swamps began. It was a tough place to subsist, let alone thrive. During one nine-year stretch, when five of the ten Jabowski kids were in braces, Stanislaw worked night and swing shifts at the munitions plant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, arranging his farm work around the full-time job. He’d feed the sheep and cows, do the milking, drive forty miles to the munitions plant, pull a full shift, drive home, and do all the chores again before sleeping. Night shift or swing shift, the cows swung with him. Somewhere in there—I can’t imagine—he planted crops and put up hay and sleepwalked through the month-long twenty-four-hour-a-day grind of lambing season. I regret to report that there was a shamefully mirror-intensive period in my life in which I engaged briefly and quite ineffectively in the sport of bodybuilding, and one of the reasons I just couldn’t keep at it was because I’d watch my bulging, lubricated compadres admiring the cut of their triceps, or the belly of their biceps, and I’d think of Stanislaw Jabowski, with his bowed shoulders and little strap-iron muscles, and how, within four days of head-to-head choring and bomb-building, he would leave those baked-fish-nibbling showpieces whimpering in a damp corner of the milkhouse. Somehow, pectorals the size of beef roasts seemed pointless.

Catholics, the Jabowskis. Seven girls, three boys. And for them, Stanislaw worked himself to a nub. They were smart kids, and one pail of milk at a time, Stanislaw fed them, clothed them, and earned every one of them a chance at college—and the Pope always got his cut. The economics are flabbergasting. The kids lent a hand, but Stanislaw didn’t encourage it. If I was a lawyer or a doctor, he’d say, I wouldn’t expect my kids to work in my office. It was a hardscrabble campaign, but Stanislaw had a secret weapon. He married Renata when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four. They tried for four years to have children, without success. So they arranged to adopt, and it was as if the decision released something, because almost immediately, Renata grew large with child, and others arrived regularly for over a decade. She washed mountains of clothes, cooked food in shifts, did some of the plowing, took outside work to supplement the milk check, and even found time to finish her social service degree and get elected to the school board. She was cheerful and fair, but she was fierce in the way only a mother can be. Aboard the Jabowski family ship, Stanislaw toiled belowdecks; Renata stood at the prow.

The youngest Jabowski boy, Hadrian, and I were the same age. We shared a classroom for thirteen years. As children, we played in his basement, wrapping potatoes in tinfoil and baking them to a cinder in the woodstove coals. During a game of hide-and-seek, I raced around behind the little white house and collided with a pipe thrust out of the ground at such a height that the full force of the impact registered directly on my maturing privates. I recall a blinding flash of pain, and little or no sympathy from Hadrian as I clutched myself and convulsed on the lawn.

The last Jabowski graduated from New Auburn High School in 1987. The cows are gone. The barnyard is thick with weeds. With property taxes going through the roof, the Jabowskis are selling off chunks of the homestead. Stanislaw, having had a head start on looking worn out, now looks a pretty good seventy-six. He still crosses the road to the barn once in a while. Last year I asked him why he built the house on the east side of the road, when everything else was on the west side. He looked at me. Didn’t want the chickens in the yard!

When Stanislaw was a child, a man walked up that road and asked for a tire pump. Stanislaw fetched one, and studied the man’s face as he patched the spare on his dusty four-door. There were other men in the car, and they didn’t say much. When he was finished, the man returned the pump and gave the boy fifty cents. Against the standard of the day, it was a princely sum. These were the Depression years. Al Capone was in jail, but gangsters still ran to the Wisconsin woods to hide, and to this day Stanislaw remembers that face, and reckons he’s the little boy who helped John Dillinger fix a flat.

It was always a worry, that road. To raise ten kids on a farm where the house is separated from the outbuildings by a county highway. Renata invented a rhyme, and taught her children to stop at the shoulder and recite: Before you cross, count to seven; otherwise you go to Heaven. There were some close calls, and once a dump truck rear-ended a pickup waiting behind the school bus, but truth be told, the real trouble always happened just downhill from the house, on the corner overlooking the Big Swamp. Over the years, the corner has claimed a litany of wayward vehicles. Sometimes the walking wounded wound up on Renata’s couch. Sometimes there were bodies in the corn. The corner is tricky. There’s something deceiving about the sweep and dip of it. People come in too fast, and confronted with the overshoot, either overcorrect or plunge headlong into the sheep pasture below. In the plat book, it is just another bend in County M, but around here, it’s known as Jabowski’s Corner, and it is infamous. Renata was at the dining room table when the girl crashed, and, hearing the noise of the tumbling vehicle, she went out to check. Someone else was already running up the road to call an ambulance.

My uncle Shotsy was a UPS driver. He used to tell me that you could take any corner at exactly twice its posted speed. The second time he rolled his big brown van, UPS let him go. I still think of him whenever I see a yellow curve sign and do the math. Uncle Shotsy was a victim of optimistic physics. They are not posted, but every corner in the county has its parameters. Exceed them, and you pay. Best-case scenario, you pay up in tire smoke and cold sweat. Worst-case scenario, you entwine your name with that corner for six or seven generations.

I have only one recollection of Janis Bourne: My classmates and I are in Mrs. Carlson’s little music room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. We are grade-schoolers, looking up to Janis the high-schooler. She is sitting in a straight-backed chair, wearing dark blue corduroy bell-bottoms, accompanying herself on electric bass and singing the Barbara Fairchild hit:

I wish I was

a teddy bear

Not livin’ or lovin’

not goin’ nowhere…

I sang the song for weeks after that. The exact chronology is unclear, but some time later, Janis was killed when her car went straight on a curve just north of town. I heard about it in school. Someone said she went way out in the brush. For the past five years, I have driven through that curve at least twice a week. Every time, I think of Janis, and her big bass guitar, and that song. This summer, we were called to a hay fire in the middle of the night. I was driving a tanker, which meant I had nine tons of water at my back, and I hit that corner too fast. I knew it right before the centerline began to bend. It was too late to make adjustments. The variables were set, the physics were immutable. All I could do was hold the wheel and ride. The truck heaved and pitched leeward, the headlights sweeping across the brush as we pushed into the deep edge of the curve. I thought of Janis, like always. The headlights swept out of the brush, dipped at the ditch, and then locked on the centerline. The truck settled back on keel.

So, technically, I wasn’t going too fast. Whatever variables I fed into the baroque formula governing that truck and me, the answer came up play again. My heart was pounding. I felt the cold breath of Janis Bourne’s ghost at my temples. Somewhere, Uncle Shotsy is grinning like an outlaw.

Used to be, when I was driving my beat-up old pickup up from college to visit the home farm, I could drop the hammer at the edge of town, and by the time I hit the spot where Old Highway 53 peeled away to the northeast, I’d be wound out in high gear. I’d shoot straight at the split, roaring up Five Mile Road through the salty-sweet air of Keesey Swamp, headed for home. In one beautiful kinetic moment, the truck would leave the banked curve of the highway, dip down and to the right, and for just a second, everything would float. Then the wheels bounced back and I’d be rocketing northbound. When I hit the split, the air became familiar. The split was my portal to reentry, and to breach it at speed was magical.

Then one night the split was gone, replaced with a carefully reengineered ninety-degree turn to be entered at the apex of the curve. I had to downshift and motor sedately through the turn lane to Five Mile Road. The intersection is safer now, of course. More sensible. But lately I see that some truck-driving youths have been making the straight shot again. They’ve worn twin tracks in the weeds, right where the old road ran. I still have that old truck. It isn’t running, but I could work on it. Drop the hammer and do a little time traveling.

I don’t mean to intimate that New Auburn is located on the frontier. A major highway runs right past the village. The people we meet on fire and ambulance calls are a mix of townies, farmers, upper-crusters with lake property, and trailered recluses. It ain’t the frontier, and it ain’t the ghetto, but there is a seam of raggedness throughout. There are women here who put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR T-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent baby-propping cant. The afternoons oxidize like trailer tin. Still, there are boyfriends, and emotions worth screaming over, fistfuls of affections rained down behind closed doors. At the bar up the block, the closing-time domestics wind up on Main Street, playing out beneath the one streetlight, the fuck you/fuck you execrations concluding with a door slam and squealing tires, the roar of the engine pocked by a missing cylinder. You can call the cops, but since the local constable quit, the closest county deputy may be an hour away. Other areas are far more remote, but we have our pockets of darkness, and because trouble is a volunteer fire department’s summons, we’re often the first to discover them. First on the scene at a raging trailer house fire, my brother—also a volunteer fireman—is met by a man walking down the driveway toting a gas can. He asks my brother, Is it against the law to burn your own house?

The girl is still lying there, trapped but alive and conscious, two miles outside of town, when the siren on the water tower goes off, rising and falling three times. Help is still a ways off. There is no ambulance in New Auburn. Depending on the location of the telephone pole you clip, an ambulance will be dispatched from a town nine miles to the north or nine miles to the south of our village. Today the ambulance will be coming from the south, from Bloomer. From the time the call comes in until the ambulance arrives, fifteen minutes will pass. In the meantime, we’ll respond with two fire trucks and a rescue van. A few of us on the department are EMTs and first responders—we arrive with a pack of rudimentary medical supplies and do our best to stabilize the situation until more definitive help arrives. Sometimes that means crawling into a tangled car in an attempt to keep an unconscious victim breathing. Sometimes it means simply holding the hand of a sickly grandmother or a suicidal farmer.

Today, the pumper will drive to the vehicle in case a fire should break out, or a gasoline spill needs to be contained and controlled. The van and the tanker will be used to control traffic. Securing the scene, it’s called. Shutting traffic down makes a lot of people cranky, but it is vital for the safety of the victims and those helping the victims.

And so the girl waits. But we are on our way now, coming from all sides of town, converging on the little white fire hall. Inside, the light is dim and the brick walls are cool. The coats and boots wait in their rows, the trucks are still.

It was never my dream to be a firefighter, or to scream around the country in an ambulance. It all began when I graduated from nursing school and found myself frustrated by the fact that here I was, freshly armed with a bachelor’s degree in the caring arts, steeped in holism and paradigms and able, if need be, to catheterize you in a trice, but I knew nothing of how to extricate someone safely from a pancaked Yugo, or splint a dislocated elbow. My first nursing job was for a surgeon in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. After moving to Rice Lake, I enrolled in a 115-hour emergency medical technician class through the regional technical school and subsequently passed the National Registry exam. When a new nursing job took me to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I hired on part-time with a private ambulance service in that town. We served a large metropolitan and rural area, as well as a long stretch of I-94. When I reported for my first day of work, the first-out rig was gone to a nasty accident on the interstate. A van had driven full speed into the back of a parked semi. When the rig finally returned, the lead EMT looked me over, fresh in my new uniform. "We were out scraping up an ohsh," he said. Long o, short sh.

"An ohsh?"

"An ohsh, he repeated. Guy in the van only left six feet of skid marks."

I still didn’t get it. The veteran EMT chuckled. "An ohsh is when you look up at the last second, see the rear end of that semi, scream, ‘Oh, shit!,’ but only make it to ‘Oh, sh…!’"

Within a year, I’d been on more than two hundred calls. I could drop the ohsh thing on newbies. I stayed on as a part-timer for more than five years, and when I moved back to New Auburn, it just seemed natural to continue some association with emergency services. But I have long since lost the ability to be flip about things like the ohsh.

Today, when I see the girl there on the blacktop, all that seasoned veteran hoo-hah will go right out the window, because she is delicate and frightened and conscious, and most of all, she is one of us. When we gather around her we are firefighters and first responders and EMTs, but we are also neighbors, classmates, family. If she doesn’t make it, I’m going to see her parents around town. It happens. Last year we had a heart attack call, found the woman too far gone, with signs she’d been dead awhile. Not long, but too long. The woman’s teenage daughter was there, teary and expectant, but there was nothing we could do. The following weekend, I was sitting at a folding table in front of the gas station selling raffle tickets for our fire department fund-raiser when the girl drove in with a friend. I had to look her in the eye, ask her how it was going. Me, worthless in her mother’s hour of death, now selling two-dollar chances to win a trip to Orlando, a beer cooler, a deer rifle, a four-pack of insulated Packer mugs. We do this whole pitch. How each ticket sold helps us raise money for critical equipment, equipment that helps us improve our service to the community. The spiel takes on a whole different significance when you’re speaking to the daughter of someone you were utterly unable to help. Another time, my brother and I drove the ambulance up a long back road where a woman was having a stroke. Her adult granddaughter rode with us to the hospital. Three days later, in the grocery store, I exited the fruit-juice aisle and came face-to-face with the granddaughter, all made up and wearing a discreet black dress.

I inquired after Grandma.

We just came from the funeral mass, said the woman.

And yet she was kind, praising my brother and me for the gentle way we had handled Grandma, for the way we had accommodated the family.

The girl is lying on the road because she came into the curve a little too fast, or a little too wide, or both, it only matters that she overcorrected, and instead of flying over the embankment, the car boomeranged across the centerline, skidding and rolling and shuddering to rest below some Norway pines on the inside shoulder of the curve, which seems counterintuitive to physics. Somewhere in the tumbling, she was thrown from the car, then dragged beneath its great weight. The blacktop is scored with evidence.

I remember pulling up in the pumper, leaving it parked by Jabowski’s. Wally, another new guy on the department, was riding shotgun, and he stayed back to stop traffic. I remember gallumphing down the hill toward the clot of people, blue medical kit over one shoulder, bunkers slapping at my legs, the cleated heels of my steel-toed rubber boots thudding on the pavement. I remember the cluster of rescuers, and I remember the chief standing on the asphalt, directing people and traffic, poking the